Let Your Work Connect You to a Deeper Life

The hermit living off of the land or the priestess tending to a holy fire in a temple know that to labor is to worship. Their work is intimately tied to their connection with themselves and something greater than themselves: their human and more-than-human community. The hermit and the priestess don’t have a spiritual moment in the morning and then become absorbed by meaningless work for the rest of their days - their spirituality is the work, and the work is spiritual.

In the same way, your labor - the energy you exert to care for yourself and others - can be a form of worship and communion with the natural world and the divine. This is possible no matter what you do for work, how others feel about your labor, or how much you’re paid for it. Your labor is sacred if you simply intend it to be so.

Notice the difference between someone who has to drag themselves to work in the morning with no belief that what they do is meaningful and someone who arrives to work knowing that their labor is sacred. When we forget that our energy and efforts are holy in and of themselves, because we are living reflections of the divine, it’s easy to be convinced that what we do doesn’t matter and that our labor is worthless. If our labor is worthless, then that must mean the labor of others can be worthless, too. Capitalism benefits from these beliefs because they create a culture in which workers can be taken advantage of.

Origins of Labor Denigration

Most of us have a hard time really seeing or valuing our own labor. We dismiss or denigrate the ways that we tend to ourselves, our homes, our loved ones, and our communities. We constantly tell ourselves that it’s not enough - that our labor must be toilsome and unending, never cherished or nurtured. We abandon ourselves over and over again as we work to prove that we are worthy of love, recognition, and a paycheck. It’s no wonder, then, that we allow ourselves and workers all around the globe to be abused, overwhelmed, and sent to early graves because of stress, overwhelm, or job-related illness and injury. We have forgotten our own sanctity.

This collective forgetting wasn’t inevitable and it doesn’t have to be permanent.

With the advent of agriculture, private property, and wage labor, human work began to be weighed and evaluated. All of a sudden, the effort that someone used to spend, say, collecting berries was now quantified and managed, worth a certain amount of money at the end of the day. As civilization and industry grew, the concept of labor became more and more narrow, limited to work deemed valuable by capitalists. Only that kind of labor, done for a certain period of time, and in a certain way, was worthy of payment (or not, as in the case of slavery). As David Graeber writes in his book, Bullshit Jobs: a Theory, “…most working-class labor, whether carried out by men or women, actually more resembles what we archetypically think of as women’s work, looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking, not to mention caring for, monitoring, and maintaining plants, animals, machines, and other objects…” This wide-ranging and essential caring labor continues to be undervalued or made invisible today.

Not only does labor become diminished in the light of modern work, its tarnishment begins in the modern education system. Capitalism as an overarching way to structure the economy requires that our children learn how to be good workers, and that begins in school. While there are some amazing qualities of modern education - qualities that every child should have access to - at its worst, it is an assembly-line into lifeless, full-time drudgery. Notice some of the parallels between traditional Western schooling and the modern workplace:

Grades / Performance Evaluations

Homework / Overtime

Recess / Breaks

Monitored Attendance / Monitored Attendance

Teachers / Managers

5-day School Week / 5-day Work Week

Value Placed on STEM Learning / Value Placed on “Productivity”

Non-compliance is Punished / Non-compliance is Punished

Disciplinary Measures / Performance Improvement Plans

Hierarchy of Staff Leading Up to the Principal / Hierarchy of Staff Leading Up to the CEO

From a young age, we were taught that only some of our labor is valuable, and it had to be expressed in narrowly defined, socially-acceptable ways. If our labor didn’t meet the dominant culture’s standards, we were excluded, disciplined, or given a low grade. It’s no wonder that we learned not to appreciate our efforts as important in and of themselves. Only if our efforts resulted in an “A,” or a pleased teacher, or a point on the scoreboard, did we receive praise and recognition. I’m speaking in sweeping generalities here, but it’s because I want you to see that you were taught to relate to your labor in an irreverent way. This has happened on such a large scale and in such horrific ways that we now have an entire society made up of people who don’t know how to value themselves or their sacred work.

Many of us have forgotten that our labor is sacred and needs to be balanced with rest and leisure. We’ve forgotten that our labor is not all that we are, and that if one cannot labor in the ways that others can, they should not be confined to poverty or a limited life. We’ve forgotten that our labor includes the love we pour into our children, our gardens, and our friendships. We’ve lost our sacred labor in the tangle of capitalism and its oppressive cronies, and it is time to take it back.

If your labor is sacred (which it is), then you (and all people) deserve to offer it up in the ways that are in integrity for you. You deserve to share it with others in a safe environment, where it is appreciated and reciprocated. You deserve to have your needs met regardless of how you labor and for how long. I believe that, when held within a safe and supportive container, people are naturally creative, imaginative, and caring. Our labor is intrinsically regenerative, and it’s bigger than any job title or salary range.

Reclaim Your Sacred Labor

What kind of a shift is possible when you relate to your labor as something sacred?

I’m not here to say that everything in your career would feel better if you would just orient to it from a spiritual place - I understand that our entire notion of work needs to be revolutionized, and that it’s not up to each individual to make work better. That said, a lot about your career can change when you come to it from a place of reverence.

The act of reclaiming your sacred labor from the toxic grasp of capitalism begins inside of you. It must start with an appreciation for yourself and what you do. Can you believe that your labor is sacred? Can you believe that even the most mundane work and effort that you exert in the day is an expression of divine wisdom and creation? That doesn’t mean that it’s always perfect or enjoyable, but can you appreciate the work that you do and how you do it?

Imagine that you’re a priestess in an ancient temple or a hermit living in intentional community with the land. You can pretend as though every effort or act of service is holy. You can act as if your very presence, with loving attention and integrity, is a form of connecting to that which is larger than yourself.

As you internalize new visions of yourself and your labor, the external expression of your work cannot help but change. You will emit a different kind of energy. You will see things differently from before. You will realize that your labor is a gift, and offer it to the people and places that are worthy of it.

For more on the topic of capitalism’s origins and how it shifted our concept of labor, check out the book Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici.